Lobotomy Uncut

A surgical procedure that became popular during the 1940s was lobotomy. If you don't know what it is or have never heard of it, I'll explain. It's when a surgeon cuts or scraps away all of the connections to and from the pre-frontal cortex to the rest of the brain. The procedure most commonly used during this time was called transorbital lobotomy, in which they inserted an ice pick through the top part of the eye and pushed it in with a hammer to break the thin bone in order to cut off connections to the pre-frontal cortex.

This was usually done to treat patients in psychiatric hospitals who had schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, among other mental illnesses. During that time period, there weren't any drugs to treat these mental illnesses, so they relied on operations like this one to cure the patients. It was also a time when more and more people were taken to mental hospitals and they were getting full of people. They had to take drastic measures to try and salvage these persons from their illnesses, or so they thought. The following video shows the steps of how they did, or in rare cases still do, a transorbital lobotomy. It's not graphic in the scenes but it is a little with the language and how frigid they make it sound.

 They also say and show how the "doctors" would put the patient to an unconscious state, using electroshock therapy until the patient would pass out. They didn't have any other kind of anesthesia in those days either. It amazes me how we look back now and think it was the most awful thing that someone can do. It similar to when they used electroshock therapy and trepanation . I wonder what future generations think is awful of the procedures we currently use, maybe taking so many pills or plastic surgery? 

For it or against it?

Hello,
I know that this is a common debate that's going around about legalizing cannabis (marijuana) in the U.S. and I'm aware that some states have legalized it. I just found it incredibly interesting a video I watched about cannabinoids receptors that we have in our brain, and it binds naturally to THC. The video explains how it evolved through time and came to be in our brain. This was completely new information to me when I heard it and made me think a bit differently about it, not that I thought negatively, just differently. Maybe it's not as bad as people make it seem.

Then, during my Medical Aspects class, my Professor started to talk about drugs and how damaging they are to our brains. Obviously, the topic of marijuana popped up and several students started sharing stories about how their grandmothers or moms would use it as teas or some sort of ointment to take pain away or numb an area of the body. That's when my professor said that one time, he had horrible pains all over his body due to his disability but the medication given to him was not working so some of his former students offered to give him "herbal tea" from Mexico. I think that it definitely has some benefits to it and then I stumbled with this video that says it can actually cure some types of cancer by making the cells kill themselves or "commit suicide". This is an excerpt from a documentary:

I'm still skeptical about it but I have to admit that it would be amazing if this is true and it cures some types of cancer!

Glue cells are in

When researchers learned about the brain, they wanted to know about neurons! It was what everyone was interested in and the focus when it came to seeing the activity of the brain and how it functions. The truth is that neurons only constitute 15% of brain cell and the rest is made up of glia cells or "glue" cells. They were named like that because it was believed that they were the glue that held the neurons together but recent discoveries and research show that they do much more and that idea is non-existent now.

Because neurons communicate through electrical activity and glia don't, neuroscientist over looked glia cells. The way that they studied activity in the brain was via electrodes that recorded electrical activity between neurons. Now, they have found new ways to study communication between glia cells and neurons like "laser and video microscopes". This is a breakthrough in the processing of brain function and a eye opener of how much more we can learn about the complexity of our brain. Dr. Douglas Fields is one of the leaders neuroscientists who have taken the challenge of understanding the role of glia cells and how important it might be for future understanding of behavior and brain functions. He has recently written a book named The Other Brain. The following video is him explaining glia cells:

I think this is amazing discoveries and shows that there still so much that we can learn and explore, especially when it comes to the brain. It's certainly a field of discoveries and that will help with diseases of the brain and memory problems. Impressive!